Earlier this month, the UK publisher Bloomsbury (best known for having struck gold with the Harry Potter books, though also a real leader on the use of Creative Commons in publishing) invited me to give a talk to its staff over the lunch hour at its London office. I gave a talk about the theory and practice of book pricing in the age of the Internet, talking about the way that strategies that are focused on maximizing revenue from existing customers can cost you access to new markets. I got into the economics of distribution channels, DRM, lock-in, and talked about what I see as the top priorities for publishers looking to continue with their success in the Internet age. Bloomsbury video’ed the proceedings and have put it up on Vimeo. It’s licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike, so go nuts!
One erratum: I was dead wrong about the German book market: prices there aren’t fixed by the state (I was confusing the German and Norwegian book markets), and Holtzbrinck made most of its fortune from news services, not trade book publishing.
